by Brian Hodge
“Yes, sir, I believe they are.”
The creaking noises advanced toward the dormer. Pinkerton drew his Maynard, holding the pistol aloft and ready to talk. Poe frantically pulled on his frock jacket and coat. His hands were trembling convulsively. But something beneath the fear steadied him, galvanized him, even ennobled him. Poe would not forsake this salty plain-speaking Scotsman. Not like Poe’s birth father had forsaken his youngest son. Not like John Allan, Poe’s foster guardian, had betrayed the young poet at West Point. No, this time, unlike his fickle kin, Poe would stand beside this decent deputy in whatever terrors were descending upon them.
“I would ask ye to stand silent and still, Mr. Poe, if you wouldn’t mind.” The creaking sounds abruptly halted. Pinkerton cocked the Maynard’s hammer back with a CLICK!
Something flashed by the dormer window — something huge and dark and ragged.
In one fluid movement Pinkerton drew a bead on the glass and squeezed off a shot. The Maynard barked. Poe jerked at the sound, as the blast punched a biscuit-sized hole in the windowpane, sending dust and shards of glass flinging, but it was a day late and a mile short.
The figure — or object or whatever it was — dropped out of view unscathed, making a loud thud in the stones down below. Pinkerton rushed over to the window and saw the figure darting off toward the road.
“Mr. Poe!” Pinkerton grunted as he threw open the damaged window, then began climbing out. “If ye would be so good as to stay here, I will return directly!”
“Not on your life, Mr. Pinkerton!” The poet went over to the window and proceeded to follow the Scotsman through the jagged maw and into the night.
Icy wind slapped Poe in the face. The smell of pine and smoke braced him. He lowered himself onto the second-storey ledge behind the Scotsman. A crust of ice made negotiation delicate, and Poe nearly slipped off the shingled roof as the deputy whistled for his team.
Off in the distance came the sound of horses stirring, snorting, leather straps snapping and popping in the shadows. Poe marveled at what he saw next: the carriage materializing along the edge of the cottage’s property like a ghost ship drawn by two winged avatars.
The horses, obviously trained by the Scotsman to respond to such signals, came cantering within inches of the building, the carriage nearly tipping over. Rusty iron wheels keened against the rocks. Pinkerton glanced over his shoulder. “I’m afraid, Mr. Poe, there’s only time to jump!”
“After you, Sir!
Pinkerton leapt off the edge of the roof and landed feet-first on the pilot bench. The buggy groaned, and the Scotsman let out a grunt. The buckboard drifted slightly, the horses rearing and scraping.
Poe came next, vaulting off the roof and landing in the cargo bed with a painful thud.
Pinkerton snapped the reins. The horses launched, and the carriage lit out.
It clattered and cobbled across the lot, then into the sparse trees where a narrow cavalry trail still cut through the weeds. The buggy began to gain speed. Within moments the carriage was roaring along at a full gallop, Pinkerton squinting to see through the swaying branches and limbs that were clawing at the passing buckboard. Straining to see any sign of the mysterious intruder, the Scotsman had holstered his Maynard, but now reached for the Roberts rifle tucked beneath the bench.
All the while this was going on, Poe was bouncing around the rear luggage deck like a loose stone. He made a feeble attempt at grabbing hold of the brougham’s bulwark but his hands were cold and greasy with flop-sweat. He could hear the rheumatic wheeze of the horses as they churned through the woods, weaving between trees, side-swiping scabrous trunks of massive pines. Faster and faster they went, making the carriage pitch like a ship on a stormy sea.
They careered around a hairpin corner at full speed, again nearly tipping.
Out of the corner of his eye Poe saw the Scotsman yank the rifle free of its nest. The weapon did a somersault, turning end over end in the deputy’s strong, practiced grip — the sound of a shell clanging into the breech — and then a loud, flat blast issued a plume of sparks into the night.
At that point Poe made his first tactical error of the evening: he rose up on his knees to get a better view of what the Scotsman was hunting.
At that precise moment the carriage hit a bump on its way around another tight corner.
It was as though Poe had been perched on a catapult, the inertia lifting him up into the air, his scream drowned by the noise of hooves and wagon wheels and gunfire as he hurled backward off the carriage.
He landed hard on the side of a ravine and careened down the muddy slope, his arms flailing, legs akimbo, one boot flying off into oblivion. He rolled and rolled and tumbled and rolled, teeth gnashing as he slammed over spiny, slimy boulders. Pain crashed in his skull. He tried to grab hold of roots, branches — something to stop this headlong plunge — but it was futile.
At last he landed on the floor of the ravine with a dull thump, banging against the face of an ancient mossy boulder that stood sentry in a stony clearing.
For a few moments he was stricken dumb, lying supine in the weeds, paralyzed from the fall, unable to see or hear or feel a thing in the darkness save his pounding head and flash-struck eyes. He tried to focus on the netherworld around him. Shadows interlaced with shadows, giant monolithic tree trunks rising up into the impossible darkness. He swallowed back the pain and finally rose to sitting position.
That’s when the terrible transformation began.
It happened in stages, the first one squeezing Poe’s heart like a vice. The ambient noise of crickets and night fauna had suddenly ceased as though a switch had been thrown. The ensuing well-deep silence sent gooseflesh down Poe’s back, and he tried to react rationally, tried to rise to his feet and stay calm, but the panic was choking him now. He could hear his own heart beat echoing in the dead black quiet.
“P-pinkerton! PINKERTON!”
The poet’s voice — accustomed to projecting lyrical wonders to the back rows of appreciative audiences — now mewled out of him with impotent terror. Something had moved behind the darkness to his left.
A twig snapped. Then another, and another. The noises were closing in from all directions.
Poe began to scoot backward on his rump like a mute, lost child. Shapes were materializing in the inky black soup all around him: predatory phantoms, their ashen faces emerging from the dark — grinning rictuses full of drooling fangs, revealing themselves to be wolves!
Wolves!
The pack had him surrounded. Poe’s heart filled his throat. Slowly, slowly, inch by inch, their shoulders hunched in attack postures, their eyes luminous with bloodlust, they approached. All possible escape closed off. No way out… and the noise was indescribable. Like a hundred knife blades grinding against a hundred whetstones.
Poe became frozen with paralytic terror, a horrible, disjointed notion crossing the back of his consciousness: They’re behaving not unlike worker bees in some unholy hive, waiting for the queen or the leader to sanction the final, monstrous, collective swarm.
“God… help… me.”
The words came spontaneously out of him on a breath of delirium. Was he dreaming? His terror had risen beyond all comprehension now because someone — or some-thing on two feet— was coming this way. Heavy footsteps came tromping slowly, menacingly, nightmarishly through the rank and file of wolves… until a figure appeared in the gloom.
Poe’s breath caught in his throat. The wolves now seemed to sag and slump deferentially, backing off like congregants in some feral church. The figure came closer and then paused in front of Poe as though for theatrical effect. In the moonlight it cast a gargantuan shadow like an inhuman Golem with improbably huge shoulders.
At first Poe could not even bring himself to gaze up at it, but finally he managed to gape up and let out a mortified utterance.
“….oh dear God… “
It was neither man nor beast… but both. Probably once an Indian, most likely Potawatomi or
Keokuk, this brown, scarred young brave was now draped in tattered feathers and a collection of bleached bones strung together into a macabre necklace. The brute bore the hideous scars of a long ago attack, perhaps the battle of Fort Dearborn, perhaps the Starved Rock skirmish. His long savage face resembled a patchwork of wounds.
But the worst part, the part that held Poe rapt with horror, was the thing on the man’s shoulders, the thing clinging to him like a hellish abomination of an infant.
To call the miserable creature riding on his back a feral dog would be understating matter: it was once some kind of classifiable species, perhaps a coyote or wolf or jackal, but was now a tufted, gouged, matted nightmare of fur and fangs, perched on the Indian’s neck and shoulders, peering over the top of his head like some kind of inbred spawn.
Right then something extraordinary happened, and even in his stupor of fear — in what he believed were his last moments on earth — Poe experienced a series of realizations that could ultimately be enjoined into a single epiphany: this is the killer, and the extra weight on his back was why the footsteps had distorted in the snow.
Then the Indian took another step closer and barked an order which sounded to Poe’s ears like “Kooomahhhh!” — and all at once the wild dog sprang from the man’s muscular shoulders, and leapt through the air with improbable grace directly at the poet.
Poe gasped as the dog landed on his legs. It felt as though an anvil had been dropped on his lap, the sound of a ferocious howl piercing Poe’s eardrums. The beast lunged at Poe’s neck, as Poe cried out one last exultation of fright, instinctively putting up his hands.
The words that came out of Poe in those final moments before the inevitable mauling — Poe would not realize what they were until later — were barely audible, delivered in a strangled whisper of surrender and absolute sorrow. “… Virginia my love I’m coming….”
Almost on cue with this whispered non sequitur, another command bellowed out of the Indian — “Keeeewahhh!” — and the mongrel dog suddenly jerked to a stop, its dripping, razor fangs only inches away from Poe’s jugular. Moonlight shone in the creature’s eyes the color of agate.
Poe blinked.
Nothing happened.
For a single, extraordinary moment, in the darkness of that clearing, this strange and abrupt tableau continued, as though the animal were a retriever on the hunt, a pointer ready to rip open Poe’s neck at the slightest command. But no command came. No sound. No movement whatsoever. Poe tried to see over the top of the beast’s conical head, tried to spy the Indian’s blank face back there in the shadows, tried to make out an expression. It was difficult to see the wolf-handler, but after another horrible moment the young man’s brown face began to come into focus as Poe’s eyes adjusted.
The Indian was gazing down at the poet with the strangest expression — head cocked with bewilderment, scarred face furrowed with recognition — heralding the advent of something very unexpected.
Something in Poe’s own visage had touched off this strange moment of hesitation. Sadness, hopelessness, melancholia, perhaps even madness… it was impossible to tell. But for one inexplicable moment, an inchoate connection arced out across the distance between the two pathetic souls, and hung there in the darkness as thick as fog…
… until the spell was broken by an enormous blast cracking open the night: the .67 calibre shell from Pinkerton’s Maynard echoing out across the ravine.
The mysterious Indian — along with his canine charge — whirled suddenly, then vanished into the adjacent woods like specters.
It happened so quickly that it nearly took Poe’s breath away, the release of weight on his midsection a blessed and startling relief.
The pack of wolves — playing the role of a mad Greek chorus — swirled and darted away into the shadows as well.
“MR. POE!”
The stocky Scotsman came trundling down the slimy trail with his pistol raised and ready. Pinkerton’s eyes were burning with alarm. “Are ye there?!”
“Here Mr. Pinkerton!” Poe called out and collapsed into the weeds.
The last image the poet saw before fainting dead away was the night sky, riotous with stars, making Poe wonder, just for an instant, if his beloved Virginia was up there.
Then all went black.
Black and silent as a tomb.
EPILOGUE
“RETAINMENT”
11 MARCH, 1848
The next day, after a much needed convalescence in the back room of Allan and Joan Pinkerton’s residence on Washington Street, the poet Edgar Allan Poe got dressed, gathered his things and prepared to depart. The cavalry would soon be after the Indian, combing the woods south of the Kankakee River. Progress razed good and evil alike.
Before his departure, Poe had agreed to meet briefly with Deputy Allan Pinkerton in a small establishment a block and a half west of the Pinkerton home. The place, John Buckley’s Saloon, was empty that day when the poet and the law man huddled at a table in the rear.
They shared a bottle of Muscatel. Pinkerton actually took a few sips despite the fact that he was a teetotaler. Poe had no problem drinking for the both of them. They relived their adventure in the outskirts, and discussed the meaning of it all. They mused on the identity of the killer, the origins of his beastly conduct and ways that he might be tracked.
Finally Pinkerton broached the real subject of this final exchange with the poet. “I won’t lie to ye, Sir,” Pinkerton said finally, cupping his hands around his mug, “I need yer perspective on things.”
Poe seemed flattered. “Of course, Sir, I would be more than happy to review future case files you might send my way.”
Pinkerton shook his head. “That ain’t exactly what I mean, Sir. What I mean to say is, I need ye on a more regular basis, if you follow my meaning.”
Poe eyed him. “I’m not quite sure I do follow.”
“Mr. Poe, I’d like you to join me as a… well… as a consultant I suppose you’d call it.”
“Dear Lord you’re serious.”
Pinkerton shrugged. “The county don’t have a lot of extra swag to go around, but I could pay ye outta my own pocket for a good long while.”
Poe looked away, thought about it for a moment. Pinkerton waited patiently. A man needs time to make a decision now and then. Poe finally looked at him. “I have commitments, speaking engagements, book tours, and material due at various publishing firms.”
Pinkerton waved his grimy hand. “Yer free to come and go as you please, whenever the need arises, free to compose, free to be Edgar Allan Poe. In other words, this arrangement would be just between yourself and me.”
Another long, ponderous moment passed in which Poe seemed to be facing something deeply buried within himself as he studied the water rings on the burnished table top. Finally he took one last, long sip of wine. In fact, he downed the entire remaining contents of his goblet. “God help me,” he said with an exasperated sigh. “I’ll do it.”
The two men shook hands, and the era of the detective was born.
FINIS
THE MINIATURIST
1.
Dusk
To bewitch an enemy: hang up a black toad by the heels and collect the venom in an oyster shell, then use it to impregnate a victim’s linen.
In the metal flake pink light the Disciple had no idea he was about to cross over.
The air was noxious-sweet like a match head that had just been struck, and the sulfalux lamps were seething with soot-clouds of bugs. The Disciple had blinders around his visor, obscuring the periphery. He was stumbling along the oxidized curb, trying to keep a narrow bandwidth in his head, trying not to panic, trying not to feedback on the juju casting after him. Night was closing in like a vice, and vehicular traffic had dwindled to nothing, and now it was only the Disciple and the wasted archipelago of hollow-toothed buildings lining the outskirts of the city.
He turned south, following the glitter-paint directionals snaking along the macadam.
F
erris sulfate, minister’s bone, magnesium, and wolfsbane have a distinctive texture when mixed and striped along a stretch of composite pavement. When first applied the formula looks like spangled enamel, like a festive toenail polish. But over the years it develops a patina like the old, faded reflective tape that construction crews used to lay down on center-lines back in the Twentieth Century.
The Disciple was desperately clinging to this aging barrier, the rhythmic tattoo of his boots crunching in the cinders, blending with the thumping of his heart. He was scared, and this time it wasn’t merely neurotic doubt. This time, he was marrow-deep scared. Edge-of-the-abyss scared. He had bet his spiritual money on the wrong pony, and now he was panicking, trying to flee the scene.
But how does a person flee a dogma? The same way one flees a dog?
Hobbling along, mind racing, the Disciple kept his cold, palsied hands in his charmsuit pockets, fondling his stringer of AmuLEDs — a dozen antique Saint Christopher medallions, treated and luminized, all gifted through the appropriate channels. He was scanning the edges of the distance for the Wiccan Tunnel, or the Piper Interchange, or the White Municipal Canal, or any conceivable way out of this dark, doomed city. But all he could read were the black cathedrals of rusted high-rises, the intersecting shadows leading to darker chasms ahead.
He sensed a change, which made him falter momentarily, breaking stride.
Perhaps it was the subtle difference in the sound of his footsteps, or the drop in temperature, or the air going clammy all of a sudden like the air in a root cellar. Or perhaps it was the faint neural buzz that feathered over him, as though the tip of an icicle had touched his spine. But whatever the cause, he lumbered to a stop right there on the road and stood there for a long, agonizing moment, gazing through his visor at the all-encompassing darkness. Day-Glo green veins flickered in his field-view, signifying an atmosphere charged with static ozone. Against his better judgment, he took off his blinders, removed his visor and took a look around the street.